#maybe i'll go back and do another hc on other talents/skills another day

[fmdjoosungarchive]

sung vs talent growth

word count: 1725

tldr; back in the olden times of 2018 sung was created with the taemin talent growth model in mind. so i wanna talk about sung’s growth so far, but the tldr is he’s grown a lot n will continue to grow a bit more. i also go over the details of these skills like i did for andy just bc it’s nice to have tgt

sung started at a more solid place of talent when it came to dance and vocals from debut than previous sungs

but in every category, sung has grown exponentially. a common theme amongst the main three skills i’ll talk about here is hyuk, and that’s because he’s shown the most change, and has the longest career for me to base change off of. quantum’s second oldest group is ateez who are still babies and hongjoong and wooyoung haven’t had major growth. and oneus are even more babies, and there i’ve only seen the hyuk-print in xion

i’ll start with the less noticeable changes and ramp up

dancing

when i originally made sung, i kind of crafted his own skillset to something as equivalent as i could to bm, because bm’s focus is on street dance, and sung’s def isn’t

and the influences from back then have stuck. bits and pieces from hakyeon(catch me having almost switched sung to that position a few weeks ago bc i luv he sm), jongin, and taemin have made up sung’s dance style

something i think they all have in common is their fluidity. they can be like noodles, and fluidity is the foundation of how sung likes to dance. however, that’s not against details and precision, as sung’s favorite genre of dance is ballet, like jongin. and like hakyeon, sung has trained for a countless amount of styles. i personally hc that’s why he was good on dancing with the the stars. and sung only started training different styles after becoming a trainee at fourteen, which is very much not the ideal age to start dancing if you want to be truly good. ballet is arguably the most difficult in this realm, as it’s incredibly strict. sung wasn’t considered Good by any ballet teacher he ever had, but it didn’t stop him. it only made him want to work harder in order to live up to his teachers’ expectations. that part is most inspired by taemin who is open about how even as a thirteen year idol, he continues to want to push himself, learn new things, better his craft, the like. also taemin’s level of strictness with himself that the angle of the distance between his fingers needs to be the same every single time, that’s v sung, born of the ballet love

sung isn’t considered a good dancer in any specific field as compared to other dancers, however, he is versatile, determined, and extremely passionate. he’s a good idol dancer tho

how this translates to sung’s position equivalents is,, difficult

while hyuk may be a dancer, what he brings to vixx isn’t dance, hongbin is only a dancer because starlights call everyone but the main vocals dance positions, hongjoong isn’t a dancer he’s a performer, leedo reads like a lead dancer so at least that’s something but it’s similar to vixx where hwanwoong is very clearly The dancer, and xion idt is dancer, while wooyoung is the only one that i think is a Dancer and reads like one

if you incorporate all quantum choreo i think sung reads like a Dancer, so for what makes sense for me i think of wooyoung first, and incorporate bits of the others in

so i’ve seen atiny refer to wooyoung as the ‘sexy’ focus dancer, but i don’t know if i necessarily agree. many ateez members rely on sexiness or facial expressions over technical skill, while with wooyoung i think it’s that he has solid technique and a good emotional connection to dance. his technical skill isn’t as good as yunho (which i think across the board the other main dancer is more technically solid than sung) but he puts his whole ass into a performance. he may personally like being sexy in dance, tho, and in sung’s case that would be more of those ‘suggestions’ from the company to play up that side of himself

anyway wooyoung has great control over his body and i think that’s something sung would have due to his love of ballet. he’s extremely strict with himself. i think at times his biggest downfall is that he can get too into the performance side of dance and technical skill can fall by the wayside because of that. that’s something hongjoong suffers from too, even tho his technical skill is way lower

the other part of his downfall is that he’s not as consistent as he wants to be, because sometimes performance wins out, and other times, his need for perfection wins out and he loses out on fluidity n groove. i’d also say his footwork isn’t the cleanest, but he has really strong hips to torso. balance and core strength is Up

overall sung isn’t Bad at anything he does. what he doesnt do, he isn’t into it for a reason

the way he’s grown over the last five years (we’ll say since joining dms) is that his consistency has gotten better, has had some minor technical growth, and he’s continued to try to expand his repertoire of ideas and genres and styles

rapping

so in gs, sung only trained for rap as much as any non skilled addition might. he was accepted for visuals, kept around for personality, dance, and passable in growth re: vocals (thank u duri), but when he was injured, he was too much of a liability vs talent potential and cut

when he was practicing on his own in the military, he wasn’t doing much rap work then either, just the minimum

it was when he joined dimensions that he was officially put on the line as a rapper, and that was mostly because it’s,, well u can dance but u need to do something else, and we have vocalists that are far superior, so we’ll just call you a rapper. you can pull off a deep voice, right?

i’m sorry to any atiny reading this but i’m gonna have to dumb down hongjoong’s rap skills

i think it’s only fair after having upped the dance skill, and fits my character/narrative better

to make the closest comparison, i would say hongbin, tho i’d rank skill a touch higher bc with leedo too, i don’t wanna stray Too far away

looking at all the equivalents together, ateez is the only model where sung might seem closer to a second rapper than a member who raps at times, since in both oneus and vixx, he’d often sing more than rap, and that can happen at times in ateez too, esp since hongjoong sing-talks many lines

and it’s fitting, even at his least talented, because sung has never and will never refer to himself as A Rapper. he’s an idol rapper thru and thru

i have less to say about this bc sung does, but in general he put more effort into it when joining dms bc he was afraid of pulling the group down, so his best moments are reflected in that. his sense of rhythm is his best trait, writing proper raps is his worst. this is the category that another five years on will probably have the least change from now til then

vocals

now this is the big boi

sung when joining gold star was,, like those american idol auditions from way back when, when they’d air an audition because it’s just That bad

his ability to recognize and mimic tone was really really shit

but since rap wasn’t for him, and he adored the idea of singing, he knew he needed to get better. so he put a fuckton of focus into finding his weaknesses and working on them. focusing so much on music theory is part of why he acclimated to songwriting p easily. but part of the difficulty was knowing what to do, and not being able to consistently do that

at a certain point he met titan’s duri, and he was gracious enough to train sung in his free time on top of what he got in gold star. the training ceased when sung was kicked out of gs, but it took him a long way forward in consistently utilizing techniques he’d learned

in the military, sung didn’t grow much, as he was only working on his own, but because he was working at all, he didn’t fall too far behind where he was when he left gs

joining dms, he still wasn’t good enough to live up to the other vocalists, but he had a decent starting point, somewhere around where the average person may start. but again, sung didn’t want to pull the other members down, so he continued working

i made this whole post because of this section, bc it’s the biggest change that can be noticed from debut, while the others tend to be changes from training to now

i mentioned earlier that i think xion is on the path to potentially having a strong diff from debut, but oneus is only two years old, while quantum is almost five years old. so i’m going to base it around hyuk’s difference five years in, which means weak inconsistent bad technique 1 line ass to [x] (fun fact this is the first vixx video i ever watched and i thought damn how are they all good vocalists. n when i fell for hakyeon n ken’s lovely voices yummy yummy) hongbin has grown too but it’s like hyuk was a worse singer at debut and then surpassed him quite a bit further so skjdks

but the technique is so much stronger, and in sung’s timeline, it would be like finding his voice, finding his tone (hyuk’s tone at times reminds me of jinki which u kno this lil shawol is weak for) and being able to stand on his own as a decent vocalist. is he the best? absolutely not. but he doesn’t feel like he’s dragging the group down anymore. he wants to get better and be able to live up to their main vocalists one day

and this five years mark i’m putting a bit further, i’d say that level would be showcased in march’s cb. rather than big jumps, it would have been a slow progression as sung has continued to have outside vocal lessons, probably 2018 and on. and while when busy they may become more infrequent, he’s not going to stop until he feels fully satisfied with his progress